Art director Papa Bo, scenographer Maksim Kruk get 3 years of restriction of liberty
Leninski district court of Minsk passed guilty verdicts in the case of art director Alyaksandr Bahdanau aka Papa Bo and scenographer Maksim Kruk, Telegram channel BY_culture reports.
Bahdanau and Kruk were detained on September 2. A DJ console was seized from Bahdanau. On September 3, they were tried for ‘production, storage and distribution of extremist materials’ and arrested for 10 days.
On the same day, pro-Lukashenka Telegram-channel Yellow Plums published a video which showed Alyaksandr Bahdanau giving ‘confessional’ testimony. In such ‘repentant’ videos published on this channel, people often look bad and have signs of beating. There were no visible traces of torture on Bahdanau’s face and hands, but his eye movements showed that he had difficulty reading the text.
Then a criminal case were initiated against Bahdanau and Kruk. They were charged under Part 1 of Art. 342 of the Criminal Code (‘participation in actions that grossly violate public order’).
Today judge Maryna Klimchuk has sentenced Alyaksandr Bahdanau and Maksim Kruk to three years of restriction of liberty in a correctional facility.
In 2020, Papa Bo repeatedly took part in protest marches; with the help of his DJ set, he played music for the protesters and called the action #MusicIsWeapon. He was also a promoter of Belarusian music groups, including Cassiopeia, Silver Wedding, Addis Ababa, Port Mone, Shuma. In addition, he founded the Korpus cultural centre in Minsk and became its art director. In January 2021, the riot police stormed into Korpus; security forces searched the office of the Makeout organisation. Then Korpus continued to work. However, on September 2, the centre was closed.
